FOREIGN AFFAIRS

FOREIGN AFFAIRS; People and Groups

By Flora Lewis

Published: March 31, 1990

PARIS—
Circumstance has a way of tripping up thought by categories, and global communications now make that evident. After all, the yardstick has to be a moral sense.

South Africa is moving to negotiate its way out of an oppressive racist system. The principle of one person one vote cannot be denied as the essence of democracy. And yet, one vote to do what, anything at all? Recognition of human rights requires a certain protection of the individual, regardless of how many disagree.

America's founders soon realized that a majority is not always just, and wrote the Bill of Rights to set limits to its power. They established an independent judiciary to oversee compliance against social passion.

Conservatives in South Africa want to assure ''group rights'' against an overwhelming majority. What they mean is to protect whites against unlimited, and they fear vengeful, domination by blacks, although they put it in terms of ''minorities.''

But sorting out people by groups with different rights is the very foundation of apartheid, racist by definition. Protecting minorities has a generous resonance in most parts of the world, but not where it means protecting one minority's monopoly of the power and the wealth.

In Transylvania last week, frightened ethnic Hungarians were talking to a Western reporter after brutal attacks by ethnic Romanians, insisting on their right to use their own language and preserve their own culture and community. ''Do you mean apartheid?'' asked the reporter. The Hungarians were shocked. Of course not, they said, but they wanted to be themselves.

A Romanian visitor to Paris said the violence had been provoked by people from the countryside trucked into the town of Tirgu Mures by the newly revived Peasants' Party, one of dozens that have sprung up since the fall of the dictator. Not all thugs in Eastern Europe were Communist secret police. Not all anti-Communists were democrats. Old memories of Hungarian oppression when the area was ruled from Budapest have survived alongside the later inequities imposed from Bucharest.

In western Poland, which was part of Germany before Stalin forced the whole country to move over so he could absorb eastern Poland, there are still ethnic Germans despite massive postwar expulsions. They too are claiming group rights, beyond the individual guarantees that a new Polish constitution is expected to provide.

Even in France, proud to have given birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, difference brings honest principles into conflict. Separation of church and state is a deeply imbedded gain of the revolution. There was recently a sharp controversy over the right of Muslim girls to wear a form of veil in public schools, a reflection of the growing friction over North African immigrants and their religion.

People are killing and abusing each other all around the world because of racial, ethnic and religious difference. Talks on how to end apartheid in South Africa are delayed and complicated by violence between supporters of the African National Congress and the Zulu Inkatha movement. Nelson Mandela's claim to pre-eminent black leadership will be measured by his ability to find an agreement with the Zulu leader Chief Buthelezi that the followers of both will accept.

Pretoria is toying with ideas about a senate based on territorial representation rather than population (but every major territory has a black majority), or groups (but that smacks of apartheid), to gain white acceptance of blacks' voting rights. It won't be easy to find a formula that satisfies principle and allays fear.

Is definition of groups good or bad, or just in Romania and unjust in South Africa? Is the individual the only definition democracy allows, or should diversity be institutionalized? Ethnicity is a human, cultural and social reality that cannot be wiped out even by so powerful an ideology and force as Communism represented.

Should it also be a legal reality? If so, are hierarchies tolerable, based on numbers? On property? On history? On the assertion of inherent superiority? Fragmentation into sovereign states is ardently urged by some as a solution. But it still leaves aggrieved minorities, and it goes against the world's many needs that require surmounting nationalism.

There are answers, but they are not simple. Asserting a universal rule brings inevitable contradictions. Circumstance matters, and it comes back to the moral command to support the weak and respect the dignity of humans. We have to learn to live with our knowledge that people are individuals who identify with groups. There's always more to learn.